A-to-Z Reflections

Well, I wanted to talk about my visit to the antique mall yesterday, but it seems we’re supposed to recap April’s blogging challenge today. Dang. Well, I guess I know what I’m posting tomorrow, then! (Be glad; otherwise you’d probably get me griping about my dental visit tomorrow afternoon, as I’d probably be posting right about the time the Novocain wears off.)

So, looking back on the past month…I needed to think ahead more. Rather, I needed to stop picking topics I could write small novels about. (Or, in some cases, topics I could/have/will write/written lengthy novels about.)

But it was fun, and for a whole month I actually knew what to write about, as opposed to my usual “what will I post today?” quandary.

Yeah…my numbers are pretty pitiful when I spell ’em out like that, aren’t they? (Keep in mind, though, I have pages and pages of listings of posts with 0 likes. And my highest ever is 7. So this month has been well above average for me.) But looking at this list this way, I’m a little surprised by a few of the numbers. Someone liked a post about one of Achilles’ horses, but no one liked the tale of the Lemnian women? Maybe I didn’t tell it in a very interesting manner…hmm, yeah, I can see how the focus on Heracles and Hylas in the tale might have put people off.

All in all, it’s been a fun month, but I don’t know if I’ll do it again next year; depends on how much time I have. I have no idea what class(es) I’ll be taking next April. If I’d been in more than one class, or if it had been more reading-intensive, I’d never have had time for this. Also, having already used up this many names/words, some of the letters will become deucedly tricky. But not impossible. And I could always focus on something other than Greek myths. (Though that is, perhaps, unlikely.)

Anyway, please come back tomorrow to hear about what I saw at the antique mall yesterday! I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with the other Diomedes.

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5 comments on “A-to-Z Reflections”

Now you’ve got a like and a comment on your “L” post. If this post is any indication of what the others are like then it might lead me to surmise that the length might have put off some visitors. Did you get many visits per post? It could be that readers didn’t know what to say in comments or know how to react. It’s kind of difficult for me to say since this is my first visit to your blog.

Your style is good–highly contemporary considering the subject matter. Your approach seems friendly and welcoming. So I’m not sure what to say. You probably just need to find the right audience maybe?

In any case, thanks for giving A to Z a shot and if you decide to return in 2016 that would be great. Sometimes the first year (I’m assuming this was your first A to Z) can be mostly a test run to see what works for you. You might want to give it another shot with another entirely different approach and see if you get more “Likes” per post.

I didn’t get many visits per post–7 was the highest number, according to my stats page–so I’m sure the length was indeed scaring people away. But it seemed wrong to change my verbose style to a more terse one for the A to Z; I would have felt like that was false advertising, since people might start following the blog thinking it’d stay that way, only to have the multi-thousand word posts return as soon as April ended, leaving new readers confused and perhaps feeling betrayed. (Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.)

Hopefully, I’ll find the right audience eventually, though perhaps with my subject matter, the audience is somewhat more limited than it is for some other subjects.

This is my first year blogging–started in August–so it was not only my first A to Z, but I only found out about it a few days before it started, because a blog I’m following was also taking part. I really enjoyed taking part in the challenge, so I hope I’ll do it again next year, but it all depends what my class schedule is going to look like. If I’m working on a portion of my thesis, I’ll probably be buried in too much reading and academic writing to be able to blog on a daily basis. On the other hand, if I’ve only got one class, the way I do now, then I’ll almost certainly do it again. 🙂

You might want to think of your blogging from a marketing perspective as well what your expectations are in the sense of platform building. What is the goal that you expect to achieve with your blog? What are your writing plans outside of your blog? How flexible are you concerning your blog? How can your blog help you with other writing plans? I’m just speculating here with some questions to ponder.

When I went into blogging I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going with the blog, but then I let the blogging format as well as the flow of the audience direct my path. At first I wrote with only imaginary audience in mind, but when I started locating an audience I directed my blogging to whatever made them respond.

The A to Z is great for test marketing your abilities, your knowledge, your dreams, and so on. The Challenge is kind of like Saturday at Costco if you’re familiar with that place or a fair or an expo where companies offer samples or their wares in hopes that the potential customer will like what they sample enough to come back.

Shorter posts or small doses of your regular verbosity might capture more curious readers who might stay with you after the Challenge. If you browse around the other participating blogs you can get some great ideas on who’s successful and what clicks with their posts in opposition to those who post decent stuff that few to no one are reading.

That’s my advice based on my blogging so far. I think I’ve had some minor success using those principles, but if you don’t experiment some you don’t always know if there’s other ways to do what you’re trying to capture in the end.